Below - development and material tests
Express Yourself - For this project I focused on my Filipino heritage, expressing it through their common condiments and food (a gateway to their culture) in a literal sense. Materials - linocut for the blue background and person, white marker for the text, mixed media collage for the inside (gold paper, cut out papers coloured with markers) and rice grains.
The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 - Editorial
For these three illustrations, I focused on the sheer fakeness and the ‘reality’ of these articles, being that they were fictional and was written purely to entertain the public. Long Banner - a movie set. Big square - Locke vandalising the moon. spot illustration - Locke above the public dangling a baby mobile.
Materials - long banner is digital with scanned textures and drawings and layout 2's illustrations (the spread above) are both coloured digitally.
Materials - black pen. unlike the others this one is more grounded - this illustration shows Richard Locke’s desk with subtle visual cues that refer to the main points of the article.
Housebound - For this project, I revolved my theme around my family kitchen and aimed to capture its general atmosphere and mood, along with the joy that entails cooking and food. Materials - I used food for all the illustrations as well as wall rubbings, tissue paper, teabags, music speakers foil, and linocut.
Observing and studying the environment around is an essential step to making and developing interesting illustrations (below).
Housed in a food container to keep it within the project’s theme, I’ve made the prints into card quality and size (A6) to give it a sense of decor and homely quality. the cards have been tied together with a blue ribbon from the kitchen’s colour palette which you can hang up as decoration inside. The lid design is made with pen and paper for the windows (it is the exterior of my family flat). I also put in tissue inside the container to make it seem like its used for leftover food.
For the word prompt ‘Without Borders’, I focused on my struggle with anger. The comic revolves around a character who cannot express this emotion even though she wishes to. The first page shows boxes of thoughts that try to contain her anger, but ultimately becomes overwhelming. (these are pages 1 & 2 from left to right)
From the end of page 1 the character tears herself apart and the personification of anger comes out. On page 2, the character takes a surreal journey upon ‘experiencing’ the raw emotion through various styles of visual imagery.
Page 3 conveys the removal of ego (the sense of self, hence the distortion and bold colours), wishing she would lose herself.
From page 4, we conclude with the character being exhausted from her imaginative emotional journey - the last surreal moment takes effect when she turns into a pea and gets eaten by the real self. This conveys the insignificance of her anger, and in a way a visual metaphor for repressing it deep down.
Materials - pen, squared paper, a snippet of Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ from page 2 and colours are done digitally in Photoshop.
(above) Process - Most of the finished pieces are cultivated from doodles and sketches. To achieve a certein outcome or narrative I constantly develop my drawings and feel the need experiment. The use of a sketchbook is where I become playful and explore ideas without being rigid. (These sketches were for the comic project)
(above) A zine for a collaborative project with fellow General Foundation classmates (this zine's theme was about the pandemic and the experience lockdown has entailed). materials: sticky notes, pen, pencil and coloured markers. My piece focuses on ways to keep yourself mentally well.
Personal Piece - 'untitled', Materials: pen.
